testing MatchMover 2012 and Maya with camera tracking

So, i've been testing MatchMover to see how good it is with camera tracking. I've just done the tutorial, but with some footage taken in the garden.

After my first two tries with "automatic tracking" it didn't work too well. It can't seem to handle the HD footage with the compression on it. The amount of pixels per compressed block seems to put the tracking points off a little. One idea might be to make the resolution smaller, with the idea that this will make the compressed areas pixels themselves, and so not cause any confusion.

On exporting to Maya I noticed it did not put the image in the background of the camera. It came up with this error:

// Error: Unable to load the image file, '/Users/monkey/Desktop/Movies/DSCF0.AVI', for rzImagePlane1

For a start, the movie file was named: DSCF01525.AVI, and not DSCF0.AVI. Second of all it is a movie file! So, to fix:

1. In the Viewport, select Panels > Perspective > rzCamera1
2. Select the camera
3. Go to the rxImagePlane1
4. Change Type to "Movie"

Done.

I noticed when put into Maya the image slips a lot, certainly a lot more then in MatchMover. The only reason I can see for this is the fact I'm using a widescreen movie file, and the camera setup might not be the same.

The first thing I tried was to increase the frame offset. I changed it to '1' and it made a little difference, but still wasn't perfect. My next thing to try is to change the AVI into an image sequence. Thirdly, I'll have to look into the 'pixel aspect ratio'.

Now, the question of how to convert to an image sequence?

Answer: use MPEGstreamclip 1.9 and upwards. Cheers.

After converting to a sequence, I matchmover'd it and put it into maya. Perfect. It looked as good as it did in MatchMover. I can only assume it was to do with things like 'pixel ratio' and frames per second? Anyway, from now on I shall only use image sequences.

Camera Tracking with Voodoo and Blender

Well, it's a little bit of a minefield camera tracking using free software as you'd expect. Heres what I've been able to find out in a few hours:

To start with you will need a video file which you want to camera track. I used a simple camera and recorded video on it.

Next you need to convert this to an image sequence (not the most straight forward things to do suprisingly). After 20 mins of looking I found VirtualDub does this and many more video conversions (worth looking at). Also, you can get blender to do it for you by putting a camera with the video in the background and rendering out the sequence (handy).

Now you can get round to using Voodoo. Open the sequence and click on ¨Track¨ down in the bottom right (took me a while to find this the first time! Should be a menu item for it). This takes a while but eventually you'll have a nice bunch of points.

You need to export this as a python script for Blender.

To get this into Blender, you need to open up the text editor, open the .py script that was saved, then click File> Run Python Script (easy!!)

Now you have the camera animated and 3D points corrisponding to points in the real world.

I managed to find the Blender side of things from this web address: http://fictionality.co.uk/doku.php?id=tutorials:matchmoving

I might add to this when I find out more. But I'm still in the testing stages.

3d tree generation

I want to create realistic trees and bushes for a project to visualise Chesterfield covered in trees. I want to use free programs and came across Gen3 - http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:Py/Scripts/Manual/Wizards/Gen3 - http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/2009/07/gen3-tree-script-url-updated.html for blender and Arbaro http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/

Looks like it is easy to create shrubs and young trees but a little harder to create mature trees. There is some mature trees which look impressive though. Both these programs are based on the findings in the document Jason Weber & Joseph Penn: "Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees" -PDF - Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees which gives information on tree generation and some presets for trees. Might be helpful.